KILLING THE NIGHTINGALE

Killing the Nightingale is the story of an aging high school English teacher whose lifelong literary ambitions have taken a heavy toll. Henry Dworshak has become increasing weary of teaching English to high school students who have little interest in the literature that means so much to their peculiar teacher. His literary dreams clearly out of reach and his career disintegrating, Henry begins take jobs as an assassin. His talent as a killer is apparently equal to his talent as a writer as his meticulously planned missions are complicated by the long hours he spends waiting for his targets and the long and peculiar tangents of his imagination that distract him from his task as a killer. Recollections from his students and his years in the classroom, books he has loved and cannot let go, his past lovers, his youth traveling and trying to work as a writer, and rambling day dreams animate his thoughts while he waits out his targets, his rifle always in hand, his finger always waiting on the trigger. While Henry takes on various missions, including a job in San Francisco, Chicago, Vail, and his most challenging mission in New York, there are other assassins employed by the same mysterious agency working in secret. Turner, a down-and-out owner of a failed motorcycle shop forced to work at a muffler shop, and Robert Bethlehem, an earnest but weary customer service employee, are also working as assassins in hopes of escaping their dreary lives. All three men, each desperate to leave their unhappy lives and their failed variations of the American dream behind, chase the payoff that awaits them when they successfully complete an assassination. Though the would-be assassins are eager and willing, killing strangers for money isn't as simple as they expect and escaping the hopeless present for the bright and easy future the three man fantasize about is harder than it seems. Each character is forced to wonder: Can we really escape the unfulfilling lives we've build for ourselves and what are we willing to do to find out?